In today's network infrastructures, hundreds or thousands of disparate devices can be scattered across remote locations that span several continents. As networks have grown, so too has the complexity of their management. To address this complexity, the field of configuration management has developed. In general, configuration management refers to the activities, methods, procedures, and tools that improve the ability of an organization to deliver quality information technology (IT) services in an economical and effective manner. Configuration management includes, among other aspects, the ability to monitor and update or change configuration parameters in various network devices.
By way of example, consider the situation where several network switches are coupled via a common network. If the administrator of such a network wanted to ensure that each switch pair operating on a common trunk were using the same speed settings, she would need to (1) manually determine which switch interface ports were connected to each other via the trunk; (2) manually examine each pair of related switch configurations to determine if a speed mismatch existed and, if a mismatch were detected, (3) update the configuration of one or more of the switches. This latter act may typically be accomplished via a command script executed against the device(s) whose configuration is being updated.
In complex environments where the number of devices being managed is large and/or where the functional interconnectivity between different devices is high, the level of effort required to perform this type of analysis renders, for all intents and purposes, such actions impossible. The consequence is that such networks are inefficiently (at best) or incompletely (as is common) managed. It would be beneficial, therefore, to provide methods, systems and computer readable media that allow the automatic configuration of functionally related devices in a network infrastructure.